


Lovecraft in Brooklyn

by SidleyParkHermit



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, M/M, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-09-07 11:15:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20308561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidleyParkHermit/pseuds/SidleyParkHermit
Summary: All roads lead back to how I fucked up in Vienna; tonight was no exception. That was why I was lying on this cold concrete floor now, my skull ringing, making mental bargains with a God that, if He does exist, I’m not a real big fan of, and hoping that by the end of the night this warehouse would still haveonlytwo demons in it.An urban-fantasy AU in the vein of the Felix Castor mystery/horror series by Mike Carey.Note:Lovecraft in Brooklynis on hiatus and will return in 2020 as fulfillment of my Marvel Trumps Hate assignment.





	1. The Dead Zone

**Author's Note:**

> The entire concept of this AU was created by [janonny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janonny) in the Steve/Tony discord server to keep us from getting in trouble for going off topic. It's been so much fun so far that I'm breaking my own rule about posting WIPs, but then again, when you think about it, Mike Carey also posted an unfinished WIP, _didn't you Mike Carey. MIKE CAREY WHEN WILL YOU UPDATE._
> 
> Also, I'm giving the work overall an M rating but nobody is boning in this chapter or anything. Don't want to do any false advertising in that regard.

It started with Bucky. It all does, doesn’t it? Bucky, and what happened to him because I fucked up. That was why I was lying on a cold concrete floor now, my skull ringing, making mental bargains with a God that, if He does exist, I’m not a real big fan of, and hoping that by the end of the night this warehouse would still have **only** two demons in it. 

All roads lead back to how I fucked up in Vienna; tonight was no exception. But tonight was also about the trouble I’d attracted more recently right here at home. And the judgment call I made earlier that very night, when I took a risk to try to fix my old mistakes, and I might have just dragged another friend down.

So. Might as well start there.

* * *

I was in my dingy office, which is also my apartment, losing a long staring contest with my laptop. (Sometimes when I have my shit together enough, I think of it as “my dingy apartment, which is also my office.” I can’t remember the last time I actually thought of it like that, though. Maybe never.) Tony was leaning over my shoulder, tapping his fingers on the back of my chair, lost in thought. 

The table was covered in notebooks and Chinese take-out boxes; both about equally full and equally useless. The longer I stared at all my futile notes, the less appetite I had. And Tony, for his part, doesn’t exactly eat.

I could get into this place tonight — probably. With everything I learned in my Special Forces days, I had as good a shot at it as anybody else dumb enough to try this. Maybe I could get to where they were holding Bucky. But without eyes on the outside, there was no way I was getting us back _out._ And that’s where the dead zone came in. Once I was even near the building, my phone would be a paperweight. No comms, no chance.

“I can’t stand this,” I said, finally leaning back and giving myself a break for a moment. “This is the closest I’ve ever been to bringing him back. At least having a shot. And the window’s gonna close on it and I’ll still be _sitting_ here on my dumb ass.”

Tony was still tapping. I was used to his habits — the way his mind goes off wandering and you just have to hope it’ll come back to your doorstep carrying a priceless buried treasure and not, like, a dead sparrow — but I could feel my temper fraying as the silence went on. And the moment I started thinking about it, as usual, was the moment he finally spoke up.

“There is one way we could still coordinate at a distance. Without using electronics.” Tony said it quickly, like he wanted to get it out before he thought better of it. “I can make us communicate telepathically.”

“…You could have brought that up a _lot_ earlier,” I said, annoyed. But then I got more annoyed at myself, because—

“You do remember I’m a demon?” Tony shrugged, and he was right. I knew perfectly well that by his nature he had the power to create a psychic bond with his…targets. I just hadn’t thought about that side of Tony’s abilities for a long while.

See, Tony was an incubus — well, _is_ an incubus. It’s not like he wished on a star one night and got turned into a real boy. He’s the same fully fledged demon of Hell that he was for the first several millennia. Only, unlike almost any other demon in the history of demons, Tony went rogue and quit serving his old masters.

As for me, I’m an exorcist, so things did start out a little awkward when we first met. 

Not sure if I could really say we became friends, if someone like Tony even has friends. But he’s helped me on some tough cases, and I know he doesn’t have to. He says it’s to stave off the existential boredom. I think there must be easier ways to do that. Case in point…

“You can make a bond like that between us without having to take off your amulet?” I asked him. (I still refused to call the technomagical wonder that shielded him from his former bosses in Hell by the acronym Tony came up with for it. I have my limits.)

“Well. No. That would be one of the downsides.” He was too casual about that, and he saw the look I gave him.  “Look,” he said, “it’s not like they’re scanning the Earth for my magical signature twenty-four-sev anyway. It shouldn’t be especially risky for me to go without the TROJAN tonight unless someone is already looking in the right place for me right now.”

“You said _one_ of the downsides, Tony.” I pointed out, rubbing at my left temple.

“Yeah. The other one, obviously, is that it involves doing my… thing.” He gestured vaguely.

“…Right.” I sighed. “So then, how would it even help? This black-ops shit would be impossible enough _without_ a magic spell in my brain making me obsess about fucking you.”

“Whoa there, Hellblazer, not everything is X-Treme Haunting. This would work with just your garden-variety infernal charm. I mean, I won’t sugar-coat it, it does alter your thought processes, that’s the point—”

“By how much?”

“Y’know.” He had his arms folded across his chest, fingers tapping on one of his biceps. “You’ll want to make me happy, pretty much anything I tell you to do will sound like a great idea, all that kind of stuff.” The tone he affected was businesslike. He didn’t meet my eyes. “But it doesn’t interfere with you going about your day-to-day, that’s also kind of the point.”

This was Tony’s whole raison d’être once: to go uninvited into people’s minds, pull the strings of their desires, and ultimately end their lives. Powers like his can be fought — that’s a pretty big part of _my_ job description. If we put this plan into action, I’d be willingly accepting those powers into my mind instead — kind of the opposite of every instinct that’s kept me alive this long.

Intellectually I knew that there was no reason to think Tony would harm me, if only because our friendship would have to be a pretty long con job to reel in a fish as small as me. But it was one thing to know that, and another to actually let him cozy up to my free will and trust him to, quite literally, use his power for good.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Let’s go. Time’s ticking.”

“Okay,” Tony said. He pulled the red-and-gold amulet out from under his shirt. It glowed momentarily, then dimmed again, as he set it down on the counter of my kitchenette. He paused for a second. “Good,” he said, “I’m still here.”

“…Tony,” I said, trying not to raise my voice, “_why_ exactly would you _not_ be—“

“Not important, it all worked out.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Ready?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.” There was no such thing as ready; he knew that as well as I did.

Tony didn’t seem to actually _do_ anything then, and I didn’t _feel_ like anything was happening. That’s how it was supposed to work, of course. Telepathic suggestion has a pretty limited usefulness if you announce that you’re doing it. So I didn’t feel different. My thoughts didn’t seem different, either. Were they? Tony looked attractive, but he was always attractive.

“So…” I almost started to ask how I would know when it was working, before I realized what an embarrassing question that would be. I definitely didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of Tony.

“Here’s a thought,” Tony said, “you should do twenty push-ups.”

That _was_ a great idea, I thought, taking off my black duster and tossing it over the back of a chair. I ought to get my heart rate up before heading out there. And not to be shallow, I thought as I dropped to the floor and did twenty military push-ups, but I bet Tony would be impressed by how fast I could do them. Maybe that was why he brought it up? Maybe he liked me. I hoped he would be impressed.

“So,” I said after I stood back up. “It works.”

“It always works,” Tony said, with no sign of the pride he'd usually have in saying something like that.

_Can you hear me now?_ Tony was still talking, but now his voice was inside my head. …_Good._

_Why push-ups?_ I asked along our new telepathic comms.

_Hey, I had to come up with something that would be weird but you could still do easily and not be embarrassed or anything. First idea that came to mind._

_I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen me do a push-up before._

He tilted his head. _I mean, no, probably not, but I’ve seen **you**._ I felt myself grin bashfully. So he had been looking. Even if it was just the clinical observation that came with the territory. Boy, this whole train of thought was going to seem weird later when I wasn’t under a magic spell. For a moment, as I thought that, I could just about see the thread of very old, very dark magic that now connected us, and could think about how to break it. I let the thought go.

_Time's ticking,_ Tony reminded me. _Let's get to work._

I let myself be buoyed by the spell into something almost like optimism. As long as I could hear Tony's voice — anything was possible.

* * *

_**Next issue:** A chilling silence! A daring escape! And a deepening mystery..._


	2. Underground

I was feeling my way down a long corridor two stories underground when I heard Tony think “oh, shit,” and then his voice was gone.

The thing about letting Tony put me under a “mild” charm was, okay, it didn’t wipe out my rational thought processes, but (I thought to myself, now that it was too late) it had still impacted my actions in ways I couldn’t notice by nature of the spell. At the time, it had felt comforting, even motivating, to settle into my total confidence in Tony, and go into action with him like a well-oiled machine.

Now I was alone in my head, and thinking about the fact that we never made any kind of plan for the possibility that Tony would have to go radio silent.

All my trained, rational thought processes said _ABORT, ABORT, ABORT._ I was stranded, and my partner on the outside was — god knew what. Anything could be happening out there.

Or nothing. Everything could be fine, it could be some stupid mishap that would rob me of this chance to get Bucky away from them — and what if it was my only chance? — for absolutely no reason. I couldn’t blame Tony for it, either. All this daredevil b-and-e shit was my wheelhouse, not his. He _wasn’t_ trained to do any of this. And he’d still chosen to help despite the danger it put him in. 

I stood still, waiting, trying in vain to find the snapped thread between our minds as I’d briefly been able to before. There was nothing. I was alone with my own thoughts and the fury building under my skin. There was no time for that. I needed to bail now; I’d have time to lose my shit later.

I let my instincts lead me back the way I’d come — as fast as I could, but it was a long and tricky path through a huge facility that officially didn’t exist. It had taken half an hour to make my way as deep as I’d been.

And something along the way wasn’t right.

There was a long, boxy room with a rolling door at the far wall, one of those garage-door-style ones that roll up onto the ceiling. I remembered it well from the way down, because if there had been a way to just _open_ that huge fucking door, without tripping sensors and making the obnoxiously loud rumbling noise that those things make, it would have been a shortcut right to the warren of rooms where my best friend and the demon possessing his body were being held captive.

So yeah. That huge fucking door was open now.

No one in sight, no sign of any security agents coming, not a blink or a beep from anything in the room. But someone had been here. Were they still?

I made my way silently down to check it out, hugging the wall. Peeked around into the strangely laid-out area on the other side. A wide, shallow room split off into corridors on either side, walls interspersed with tinted glass, the hallways angling again at the edge of what I could see; it felt like it was built to confuse. I kept going.

A movement caught my eye in the dark, something clearly bigger than any human. It was fast, shadowy, its movement distorted in the way that demons could do to the human eye. It had wings.

I plastered myself to the wall, holding very still. The shape was out of sight as suddenly as it had appeared. _That_ couldn’t be Bucky — could it? A demon possessing a human body couldn’t manifest…that. Last I knew.

Every goddamn direction I could go was a big old roulette wheel of death now. But maybe, if I could at least figure out what was happening right now in front of me —

I threw an arm up in front of my face before I knew why, my sixth sense protecting me from being slammed full-force in the head.

Okay, _there_ was Bucky.

I hit the dirt and tried to kick his legs out from under him but, like the other demon who was still down here somewhere, he was fast as hell. His eyes glowed red, the demon in the driver’s seat not bothering to conceal itself. I wasn’t sure if it knew me or not.

I could see that, though he was freed from his cell, the Initiative had put his body in restraints that resisted the demon’s strength, both physical and arcane. The lower half of Bucky’s face was covered — muzzled? — and his hands were bound in front of him in some kind of paranormal ziptie. Whatever they had access to, I sure wished we had it on the street.

I’d hoped not to have to brawl with this thing, but hope doesn’t save you from getting killed by a demon, no matter what the inspirational Instagram accounts might say. I’d spent a long time preparing for exactly this. I had all my best gear and then some. Under my tactical clothes I had sigils to protect me and hopefully help subdue the thing in Bucky’s body.

I scrambled back to my feet and got my ass kicked faster than it’s ever been kicked before. You ever fight something much stronger than you, when you’re trying not to hurt it, and it’s trying to _kill_ you? Don’t judge me. Okay, I have more hand-to-hand combat training than your average demon, but that still didn’t give me much except a better chance of surviving long enough to run away.

Bucky’s crazily strong arms, burning with a supernatural heat, hauled me all the way off the ground in his bound hands Darth-Vader-style and then knocked me back against the wall. All my focus went into trying to protect my head from the impacts, but he just pulled me back and slammed me upwards again, and this time my skull connected.

Something seemed to move behind him. I couldn’t figure out what it was before I blacked out.

* * *

I became vaguely aware of passing lights. I was pretty sure I wasn’t dead; everything hurt too much for that.

“This _is_ very on brand for you,” said Tony from my left. “Can’t do your whole noir gumshoe thing without getting knocked out sometimes.”

My eyes registered the interior of a moving car, a stereo display in red informing me I was listening to the Queen station on satellite radio.

I passed out again, wondering as I did if it was just the head trauma and the bass or if I really was hearing some kind of thumping noise from inside the trunk.

* * *

When I regained consciousness the second time, I was lying on a bare concrete floor. Something near me was too bright, the rest of the place too dark. Everything still hurt.

The too-bright something, almost painfully bright, was the glow of a circle drawn on the floor, thick with arcane symbols, its power making my head throb. In the circle was Bucky, sitting cross-legged and still, with his hair over his face. Tony’s pendant was on the ground near him, suggesting that Tony had gotten it onto him at some point and he’d thrown it off.

We had Bucky. Against all odds, we actually _had_ him. Now if only I had a clue what had just happened.

“Where are we?” I said, propping myself up on one elbow.

Tony was sitting near me, messing with what looked like it might be a second edition of the TROJAN device and keeping one eye on Bucky. “Dead Hook,” he said.

Made sense. I didn’t recognize this old warehouse, at least not from the inside, but it was the kind of place you’d find in the south Brooklyn neighborhood that was still called “Red Hook” by hopeful realtors and no one else. I could feel the criss-cross of arcane energy, all kinds of noise going through the air like radio waves. Ghosts, demons, and undead found safety in numbers out here, alongside those few mortals who had reasons — good or ill — to live among them. It was a dangerous place to throw an exorcism. But at the same time, it was the best place to hide a demon or two in plain sight.

“Tony… how did we get out of there?”

“Had to brain-poke a couple people,” he said grimly. “They’ll be okay.”

That went a long way towards explaining the situation back in the Initiative building. There’s a lot of strategies you can use to get past any given layer of security. ‘Find a human being with access and mind-whammy them’ is… one method.

“I saw another demon in the complex right before this one jumped me,” I went on, rubbing the back of my head. “Something big and fast , with wings.”

“Yeah, that was me,” Tony said.

I opened my mouth and then closed it without a sound. That… answered some of the rest of my questions, at least logistically.

“Wanna see?” Tony’s appearance — rippled. His pupils changed shape, the sheen of his skin started to change, and he seemed to remember just in time that he should take his tank top off before his transformation ripped it apart. And _there_ were the wings.

Jagged, unearthly, but also clearly built for actual flight, they startled me even though this was far from my first look at a pair of demon’s wings. No matter how used to it you get, demonic and celestial magic can still make your stomach drop a little. It wasn’t that Tony had a pair of wings that just folded up really small under his regular clothes. He _had wings,_ which he was born with or created with or whatever, and then when he changed into his human form, he didn’t have them anymore.

A lot of us humans have seen through the proverbial veil these days. Some of us make our living out of it. But the deep, caveman knowledge that you’re not supposed to be seeing this never actually goes away.

“I — I believed you the first time,” I said.

Tony gave me a little smile and a wink. He didn’t continue transforming into the fully inhuman form I’d glimpsed in the basement, and I expected him to wind all this stuff back up and go back to his human appearance. Instead he let his wings stretch out behind him, then rested them on the ground. It seemed not so much bird-like as… bat-like? Which was what they resembled more, anyway, insofar as they looked like any earthly creature’s wings.

“Okay,” I said. “So that answers my question about how you could have hauled both of us down here on your own.”

“Not entirely,” Tony said. “That’s a whole nother question we need to talk about. Because I shouldn’t have been able to overpower this guy enough to do that.”

“In fairness, I totally wore him down first,” I said.

“You had ‘em on the ropes,” said Bucky’s voice, sounding completely normal. A chill went through my blood as I stared. There was a mean, twisted smile on Bucky’s face that told me right away this still wasn’t him. (Who else would have been able to tell, though? If this thing got free it could make Bucky’s body do anything, and who would know he wasn’t responsible?)

The muzzle that had covered Bucky’s mouth was off, dangling from his still-bound hands. Tony furrowed his eyebrows at the demon. “Hang on, could you have done that anytime?”

“Not anytime, only when it was fucking creepy,” I muttered.

**”It’ss not important to usss,”** said a new, horrible voice from inside Bucky. **”We’re not hungry.”**

I stood and walked closer to the magic circle. “Who’s ‘we’?”

**”We are the nexssst evolution of demonkind. We are CARNAGE and we are inffffinite.”** It made a creepy Hannibal Lecter teeth-sucking sound with Bucky’s mouth.

“Mm. Yeah, you’re pretty finite there actually,” Tony said. “Like, you’re clearly just one guy.”

**”Such confidence. And sso misplaced. It doezzzzn’t have a clue.”**

“I want to talk to Bucky,” I said. “The real Bucky.”

**“No kidding,”** the demon cackled at me. **“Bucky wantsss to talk to you too! What’sss left of him misssssess you badly.”**

I’d known what this would be like, I’d known the thing would taunt me. But that didn’t stop the hot rage I felt. “Keep talking, asshole, the monologues are my favorite part.” I turned to Tony, who was still sitting on the ground, and held my hand out. “C’mon, I’m vertical now. Let’s get to work.”

Tony looked up at me and shifted his form again, going back to his everyday human shape, before taking my hand to stand up. “Yeah, I gotta talk to you about that,” he said. “Let’s get a little space.” He put a hand on my shoulder and led us farther from the circle, until there was enough distance in the cavernous warehouse between us and them that we could at least imagine we were speaking privately.

“This is what I was starting to tell you,” Tony said. “Why I could overpower Mr. Friendly over there before. They can’t leave Bucky’s body even if they wanted to. There’s something real weird going on with this possession, something I’ve never seen before. You, by the way, know more than you’re telling me.”

“I…” I sighed. “I don’t know any more than you do about this demon.” That was technically true, even if we both knew the emphasis was on the ‘technically.’

“Yeah. We can follow up on that later. Point is, speaking as someone with a few thousand years on the job, something’s happened here that’s different from any kind of entanglement I know of. If we treat this like a normal possession, I’m not sure what it’ll do to little Carnie but we’d most likely end up killing your friend.”

There it was, what I’d feared all along but hadn’t let myself say.

“Are you sure?” I said quietly.

Tony sighed. “I don’t want to be right. But I know as much as anyone alive about this.” He nodded towards the being that snarled at us from inside his magic circle. “I used to be this.”

**”Common incubusss comparessss itsself to usss,”** the demon said, its snarl fully audible through the vast space even though it didn’t sound like it was raising its voice.

“Shut the _fuck_ up,” I suggested.

“In the meantime,” Tony went on, “I know we just busted him out of one set of kidnappers, but this guy needs to be captive.”

“That’s what Bucky would want us to do until we can fix this,” I said. “I know him, he’s in there and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“I don’t doubt that. We gotta find somewhere strong enough to hold him, though. That’s not gonna happen at your place. Could conceivably at mine—“

“Tony, I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”

“—but I still have to figure out if my security’s compromised.”

Right. The other question I had about tonight.

“Yeah,” I said. “What happened out there? You said ‘oh shit’ and I lost you.”

“Not sure exactly what happened,” he said, and I could tell his charm spell wasn’t having any lingering aftereffects, because I knew _that_ was bullshit. “Look, not everything is human business.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a feint to avoid the subject until we could talk out of the demon’s earshot. Either way, I knew Tony had taken on a big risk to help tonight, and it might have brought down the worst kind of heat. “Just tell me if there’s anything I can do,” I said. “Believe me, I — I know that you didn’t have to do all this.”

“I kind of did, though,” Tony said, still sounding so casual. He looked at the demon distantly. “Like I said. I used to be that.”

* * *

** _Coming up:_ ** _ All our exes live in… churches? _

** _Then:_ ** _ For a demon on the run, is anywhere safe? And what are the sinister origins of CARNAGE?_


End file.
